The present invention relates to media, systems and a method for aiding medical professionals in the diagnosis of heart conditions.
The present invention relates more particularly to the use of heart sounds to provide such diagnoses.
The invention further relates to a system and apparatus which help to familiarize practitioners with the relation between specific heart sounds and corresponding heart conditions.
One of the oldest basic techniques employed in the practice of medicine is auscultation, which involves listening, either directly or through a stethoscope or other instrument, to heart sounds and making at least a preliminary diagnosis based thereon.
This form of diagnosis is widely used because it requires nothing more than a stethoscope which, by its nature, is highly portable and relatively inexpensive, reasonably acute hearing and the knowledge to interpret the sounds heard. Conventionally, this knowledge has been conveyed by allowing students to listen to a variety of heart sounds and instructing the students on the condition represented by each different sound. The value of this training depends to a considerable degree on the student's audible memory and very few resources are available for refreshing a practitioner's skills in this area. However, acquisition and retention of those skills is a problem, particularly when one considers that the explosion of medical knowledge has of necessity reduced the time which can be devoted to teaching auscultation in medical schools.
In light of an acknowledged need for resources which can be used to learn or relearn auscultation, various types of media providing recorded versions of various heart sounds have been placed on the market. These media include a variety of word descriptions of the individual sounds by analogy to generally known sounds. For example, such descriptions may use words such as "rough", "smooth", "train wheel", etc. to describe various heart sounds and murmurs. Of course, the manner in which these descriptions would be interpreted varies considerably from one individual to another. These known media do not permit the knowledge required to arrive at diagnoses by auscultation to be learned, or relearned, in either an acceptably short time or with the requisite degree of accuracy. Therefore, the methods and systems proposed to date fall far short of that which is needed to place the practitioner in a position to make effective use of this potentially powerful diagnostic technique.